


Shall Your Flame or Your Smoke Burden the Wind

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Cultural Differences, Dorian/Bull Is Endgame Do Not Panic, Drama, Friends to Lovers, Gen, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Past Relationship(s), Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 11:46:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5126354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian returns from war, spars with Vivienne, keeps a secret, considers Iron Bull, and faces the problems of peace and pleasure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shall Your Flame or Your Smoke Burden the Wind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [electricshoebox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/gifts).



> Belatedly, for Riss, who asked for winter and kissing in the snow. I will eventually deliver. ♥
> 
> Very much a spiritual sequel to _[The Ebb of Your Tide and Its Flood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4402565)_ , but stands on its own.
> 
>  **Content Notes** : Spoilers for the main quests up to and including Here Lies the Abyss; discussion of canon-typical homophobia.

  
_But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?_  
_Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night,_  
_or the firefly the stars?_  
_And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?_  
_Think you the spirit is a still pool_  
_which you can trouble with a staff?_

\--Kahlil Gibran

* * *

In Dorian's dream, it's August again, and summer wisps the last of its warmth against the massif of the Frostbacks. Mountain meadows bloom frenetically before the descent of the first night frosts. Autumn grain and potatoes ripen in the black soil of the valley below Skyhold.

Summer, the first of its kind in the high mountains.

Late breakfast on Vivienne's balcony, overlooking the bailey. She's somehow arranged for coffee, dark, wondrous and bitter.

As they finish, she says, as an afterthought, "You appear to have an admirer, my dear."

"I do?" The thought peals like a dropped cup upon stone, spinning and spinning. "Well. My appeal _is_ obvious to both the hopeful and the hopeless."

"Has the search for our dread adversary's name quite muddled your powers of perception?"

He bends to retrieve the cup once it's still--and miraculously unchipped. Cream-pale porcelain, glazed blue on the inside. The silk of Vivienne's skirts rustles like the leaves of the garden trees as she moves to the banister.

"I haven't had much time to scour my correspondence for love notes," Dorian rejoins, a beat late. "Should I be checking my windowsill for perfumed scarves? Do the Fereldans even have an etiquette for this sort of thing?"

"I do believe the man is a Marcher. One of the commander's brightest. Incidentally, also in charge of the morning drills today."

Bemusement floods him like the sunlight as he steps up beside her. He remembers both like living things against his skin. The training yard is packed with soldiers paired off for free sparring, sand flying and steel clanging on shields and blocking blades.

The lieutenant isn't much to look at from this distance: a dark, curly head of hair, the sparing, springy step of a career soldier when he weaves through the troops, fixing stances, shouting instruction, pausing to point a bloody-headed recruit towards the infirmary.

A frostbite scar splays across his left ribs, always hidden, even in this sultry heat. Dorian learns this later, and the story behind it, never yet.

"Really?" Dorian raises a brow at Vivienne, who is feigning interest in the arrival of a courier on the lower bailey. She is most often waiting for letters, so it might not be all pretence. "A templar? Not a mind-numbingly pious sort, I do hope."

She isn't sniping. They do that, a fair bit, two seasoned duellists of the high courts caught on the road together.

"On that, you must pursue your own inquiries, darling. I merely thought to point out the possibility."

"Out of the kindness of your heart. Why, madame, I might swoon in surprise."

"That it might please me to see you pleased?" She smiles, a sloped line of prim amusement. "I shall send for a fainting couch."

Down below, the lieutenant raises his voice through the sunlit air in rasping--and blisteringly rude--Orlesian. Vivienne gives a sudden dry laugh. "Oh, that was nearly clever."

That caustic wit is the first to falter under Dorian's fingers: it tumbles into moans and curses so quiet that Dorian almost wonders if they've learned the same lessons of silence. No, but chantry dormitories are cramped, and the corridors too cold to sneak out in winters in the Vimmark Mountains.

Now, before, he sets down the porcelain cup on the banister, gives Vivienne his thanks for the breakfast, and wanders off to the library.

The window beside his nook offers a decent view of the training yard, anyway. For a moment, a morning, he lets himself be diverted by possibility.

* * *

Dorian jerks awake, regrettably, curled into his cloak in a stopped wagon. The war camp rushes with noise all around him: the rattle and grind of the trebuchets being brought into position, officers calling, runners dashing to and fro. It smells of sand, canvas and horse, and then, startlingly, of cardamom.

"Tea?" Vivienne leans into the paltry shelter of the wagon. "We shall move within the hour. You will wish to fortify yourself now."

Dorian takes the steaming tin mug from her. Proper spices. He wouldn't care if she'd discreetly murdered a cook to get them. "As soon as you have a Divine again in these parts, I'll petition to have you named Anointed, madame."

"Charming. You do know the declaration is posthumous."

"Which makes the scenario about as likely as the Andrastians listening to a case put forth by a Tevinter."

Her chuckle rings dark. She's dressed in rune-reinforced steel and halla leather, not summer silks.

She makes room for him to climb out, under the last glow of dusk. Few tents have been pitched, for the army is in mid-preparation even after the hard march of the day. To the southeast rise the time-pitted towers of Adamant Fortress, and the Grey Wardens huddled behind them are bracing for the siege.

He drinks the tea and eats standing up while they review the strategy: their small team--Lavellan, Vivienne, Dorian, Cassandra, Blackwall and Varric, joined by Hawke and Warden Stroud--will slip into the fortress as soon as Cullen has a gap for them to squeeze through, and hunt down Warden-Commander Clarel in the general confusion. The temperature is dropping towards its nighttime low. It's still warmer by far than it must be in Skyhold, across all of Orlais.

He'd rather not dwell on Skyhold, never mind the curling edges of the dream that was half memory. There's battle to be done here, a different kind than the one they wage against the rifts in the wilds.

Only a handful of fires burn on the battlements. Dorian can spot nothing to rival the staggered line of trebuchets raised outside the walls, though he's not fool enough to discount the threat of the Warden mages, honed for battle and chained to Corypheus's will.

 _Like a dreadnought_ , Bull said of Vivienne's prowess once, and was not far wrong. The question will be, how many of those mages are her match, or Dorian's own?

 _Well_ , he thinks, brashly, like something he might throw to Bull or Sera if either were here. _I have gone to war before._

* * *

In through the cracked gates. Inquisition infantry swarm into the opening, locking shields, holding a tenuous bridgehead just inside.

Lavellan nods to Cullen, then to them all, and they go.

It is blood and flame and the jangle of armour, arrows barely buried in shields instead of throats, ice spikes flung through the hearts of men who'd have killed a comrade with the next sword-stroke. The thunder of catapult stones against the battlements is accompanied by the roars and scrapes of the demons hauled through the Veil by the desperate Grey Wardens.

Dorian falls into a switching pattern with Vivienne and Lavellan. One of them tends to the defences of their strike team, while the others go for the monsters with whatever hurts them most. Spindle-limbed terrors teeter under his necromancy, and Vivienne lays waste to the rage demons with immaculately aimed ice glyphs. Around them, the others put sword, mace and bolt to swift use.

With that breathless, single-minded push, they make it to the heart of Adamant. To the Warden-Commander, that posturing imbecile Erimond, and Corypheus's blighted pet dragon.

It says something about Dorian's recent experiences that he's barely fazed by that.

When the beast starts tearing into the fortifications, he admits to the pinch of fear. They may have brought down a dragon in the Western Approach, but this huge, gangrel creature, infested with red lyrium, is a world removed from the flesh-and-blood animal.

He has five of the craftiest, most stalwart people of his acquaintance by his side. And a senior Warden and the Champion of Kirkwall.

Then the dragon lands onto the too-narrow parapet in a torrent of flame. Either age or a trebuchet shot has caved in some lower part of the wall, and the beast's weight does the rest.

Cassandra screams as she slides past, her gauntlets scoring the tilting stone. Varric's hoarse "Seeker!" from behind Dorian is lost as a mortar seam splits right under their feet. Still Dorian reaches out with a half-blind casting to soften her fall, Andraste's mercy, if he can even make the barrier connect--

The stone drops out from beneath him. Dust and panic choke him.

Green flashes below in a pulsing, widening gash in the fabric of the world.

* * *

By the time they're following a cryptic doppleganger of the late Divine through paths of the raw Fade, not in their dreaming minds but their living bodies, Dorian's dread is a fanged thing in the pit of his stomach.

They all deal with it: horror locked away under a shell of resolutions. To Blackwall and Cassandra--and Warden Stroud, likely--it stems from a life of fighting. Every soldier faces their mortality sooner or later, invites it for a drink and makes peace with it.

Vivienne is calm as ever, her every step a beat of purpose. Dorian knows her brand of resolve intimately. She shuts in every emotion the Nightmare could use as a loose thread to pull, as all mages are taught.

It gloats in its booming voice from the impossible shadows. They cut down its scurrying minions and slog on through ponds of water that shimmer like metal-dusted ink.

Dorian finds himself thinking, in a narrow margin of his mind, _Thank the Maker Lavellan did not bring Bull here._ It's a fleeting concern, but he is glad of it, if of nothing else. The last two months--the exile from the Qun--have not been kind to Bull. Dorian has yet to draw some final conclusion of the facts, but this he does know.

He shunts the thought away and turns to fry another keening demon with a handful of lightning. Some things must take precedence.

"Spiders," Lavellan whispers when there's a pause in the fighting, probably thinking Dorian's standing further off than he is. "Elgar'nan take them, always spiders." Nearby, Blackwall stares at his unsheathed sword, as if the bits of demon on it were something more than black, deteriorating dregs.

"Sparkler, on your left!" Varric's shout jars them all into action again, forces breath into tiring lungs and strength into flagging fingers. Dorian pours a swirling spout of flame down upon the first shape that breaks from the murky water. It has no time to fully take form, but he spies thin, thrashing shapes even as they are consumed.

The fearlings tailor themselves to some personal, minor terror, plucked from their thoughts. So, he sees serpents. Not even the huge, lazy tree-climbers of the Qarinian hills, but tiny coppercoil snakes that would lie on the sun-baked steps of the abandoned temple outside Minrathous, like a careless matron's hoard of bracelets. He'd take care to stomp his feet and make them slither away before coming up.

 _They unnerve you,_ Rilienus said, laughing. _They're not even venomous._

Dorian huffed, and next time, strode up through the clusters of coppercoils with his chin set and his palms damp and cold. Rilienus laughed again, took his hand, and kissed the salt of his sweat from his skin.

With a jolt, the memory shears away. "Fuck," Dorian gasps, and drops his hand, the heat of his fire spell still in the air. Around him, the others are dispatching the rest of the fearling nest.

The Fade pulls at him differently now, but its tug is as fierce as in dreams. For a split instant the memory was more real than his surroundings.

"They keep coming from the water," Blackwall says, his voice grim, nearly the first words he's spoken. "Can anyone see a path that'd take us out of this muck?"

Cassandra points out the shape of a small headland, rising above the slithering waterways up ahead. Without further debate, they climb onto the volcanic-looking rock, each soaking wet to the knee or above. Their strange guide hovers a ways away, its glow the only warmth in the green-tinged landscape.

The most ludicrous thing is this: they're corporeal, and thus hunger sets upon them. Gnawing on a chunk of hardtack, taken out of the pile of what they had in their pockets and pouches, Dorian crests a shallow ridge of rock beyond their resting spot. A body of water curves away to the twisting horizon on his right, but on the left, in a sort of glen, lie weather-beaten rows of grave markers.

They've come across bits and pieces of manmade objects along the way. This odd collection, headstones in a dozen styles, seems the most _normal_ sight he's seen here. Some are crumbled with age or covered in colourful lichen, others look as they might've been erected just the other day. He brushes at a clump of moss atop the nearest one, and the moss falls away to reveal the inscription.

 _Magister Gereon of House Alexius_ , it says, and below, in the same gilded letters, _Loss._

"What?" he says softly, to himself. A prickle creeps up his spine in dull needles of misgiving. Alexius was executed by order of the Inquisitor. Dorian had some bitter words with her over it, but it was her decision. He's tried not to let it shadow their emerging friendship, at any rate.

He moves past the marker to a much humbler one, carved with rough, blocky letters. _Sera_ , it proclaims shortly, and Dorian swallows down a thickness in his throat. _The Nothing._

Sera. Sera is _alive_ , gone to Jader with a few of Leliana's people. His head whips up for a look back across the rise: the rest of the party sit or stand there. He is _here_ , as in, aware of his body, not lost in some dream-layer of this place.

How would "nothing" kill you, anyway? Dorian takes another step, looks at another stone, and rather wishes he hadn't.

He's tried to scrub the name from his memory, in the same useless way he sometimes longs to forget his father's plan with the ritual. It's necessary knowledge, but in his weaker moments, he wishes he could unshoulder the pain. _Rilienus_ , he reads, then the family name, the sound of it hollow with old misery. _What he wanted most._

They are not causes of death. This is the realm of the Nightmare. Dorian stands in a graveyard full of the names of those he's cared for--does care for--and each headstone spells out a fear. Alexius shattered at the loss of Felix, and...

He spins away from the marker before him, the stifling weight in his throat spreading through his chest like tar. He wants out, he wants to shut his eyes and be led to improbable safety. Somewhere here are the names of his parents. Felix. The Inquisitor, if he's unlucky.

Trying to fix his eyes on the shifting horizon, Dorian makes a straight line for the closest edge of the graves. That works fine for several steps, until his boot heel slides on slick stone, he catches himself by dropping into a crouch, and the fallen marker gives up its secret before he can turn away.

 _The Iron Bull_ , in thick, austere letters. _Madness._ Dorian's damp glove lingers on the inscription. He has a feeling as if looking at a garden maze from a high angle, seeing the heart but not being able to reach it.

 _I can't think about this now._ He's been straying, too often on the road, back to Skyhold and to a room in a corner of the main keep. To a morning when he walked out and left the air thick with things he hadn't dared say or do.

_I can't._ Dorian draws in the ephemeral air and holds it in his lungs until they're on the brink of burning, then exhales.

"Whatever have you found?" Vivienne's tone might be the same had Dorian presented her with some minor magical curiosity. It cuts through the humming in his ears.

"Nothing important." He gets to his feet. Whatever the stones would show to her--riddles of his loved ones, or her own--he'd rather that she avert herself. She stands yet outside the rows, the tails of her fitted coat lifted by a restless current. "I suppose you're here to tell me you grow weary of my dawdling."

"We are all weary. We'll only grow more so, the longer we linger."

"True enough. Let's be off, then." Taking her stock-still, wind-whipped form as a beacon, Dorian steps over the slanted gravestone.

* * *

Then it is all chaos: their guide flings itself against the mountainous, many-eyed demon Erimond was contriving to summon. Never let it be said a Tevinter's madness lacks for scale.

That feat of protection, of course, leaves their tired band to deal with the Nightmare itself. It conveniently manifests as a skull-grinned figure, adorned with twitching spider's limbs curving out of its shrivelled, veinous torso. At least now he can try to stuff a fireball down its throat, Dorian decides as he forces himself to focus on one more bout of combat magic. 

"When we're-- _nngh_ \--out of here," he gasps at Vivienne as she knits his cracked ankle, her fingers iron-hard and ungentle under the wash of the healing spell, "the commander had better have a dashing captain or six to carry us back to Skyhold. I intend to swoon at the first sufficiently handsome one."

"If you have breath, save it for a spell," Cassandra cuts in. She stands over them with a leonine air, ready to leap at the first charging demon. The others surround them to close the circle. The left side of Varric's face is a crust of red, though an elfroot draught cleared his head and stanched the bleeding.

"I shall expect a palanquin." Vivienne wipes her face with the sheer muslin scarf that was her sole concession to the desert heat of Adamant. Rolling his ankle and finding it whole, Dorian wrenches back onto his feet.

In the next instant, Hawke calls out, "Here it comes again!" The avatar of the Nightmare bursts back into view, trailed by a score of smaller monstrosities.

* * *

To his credit, Dorian remains conscious throughout the rest. The return of the enormous demon, Warden Stroud turning to face it, a grim challenge on his lips. The headlong dash through the open rift, the blissful sound of their feet on real, physical flagstones that he can't appreciate in the moment. The moment is taken up by the Inquisitor, who hands it to Blackwall, who makes a reasonably impressive speech for a man just pulled bodily through the Fade.

And the Wardens stand down. Lavellan's offer of sanctuary with the Inquisition is accepted. If she carries on in that vein, her mere word will one day rattle the bones of the world.

Dorian doesn't get to tell her that as they return to the camp at last. Quite without a strapping soldier to catch him, he collapses on what he hopes is his bedroll and sleeps for three quarters of a day.

It's something that he is the first to wake. Lavellan and Vivienne continue to slumber in their shared tent. Fighting wears down a soldier and a mage alike, but Dorian's come to understand the toll sustained casting takes on the mind. A fighter can narrow their thoughts to the next order, the next swing, the next draw of the bow. The hard pace of magic in a battle demands instead a continuous grasp of a fluid, ever-changing whole. The Veil churns with each spell, twisted into new configurations: at best, it's a flow, but one all too easy to drown in.

The rumination at least keeps more troubling thoughts at bay. He takes his bowl of oatmeal and mug of tea--the sour stuff brewed by the cauldron in the camp kitchens, tarry and bracing as a wet cloth to the face--and wanders up onto a knoll overlooking the fortress.

Under the sunset, Adamant looks placid. The towers and battlements are still, the stripped flagpoles pointing to the sky. No banners will fly over Adamant anymore. The sky above is a proper tint of purple, though. That's a comfort of its own.

It'll be a story to tell, if he can ever work out a palatable version. They all have reports to write, to be discussed and compared and archived in Skyhold's nascent chancery. He ought to get started, now that sleep and the terrible tea have revived him somewhat.

What to say? Yesterday, they accomplished, if accidentally, a thing no living soul had done for millennia. Somewhere, an aspiring demonologist is losing their head over the first-hand observations Dorian can now contribute of fearling metaphysiology.

Here, now, he cradles secrets he was never meant to know. The Fade makes it difficult to untwist truth from illusion, but he's learned a few crucial lessons on its nature. It will not lie when the truth will do.

Knowing the fears of your enemies is an advantage over them. Knowing those of your friends and companions is--is a measure of trust, if that knowledge is imparted willingly. What is it, then, if one comes by that information without asking?

"Madness," he repeats aloud what keeps echoing in his thoughts. Its contemplation seems a kind of insanity in itself.

Bull must be the steadiest person he knows. Dorian is well aware he isn't unflappable; the Storm Coast and the choice between the Chargers and the Qunari shook him more than he ever let on. Even so, the idea slithers in his mind like a snake in his fist. Smooth scales, sun-warm, like in a memory of yet another time.

With a sigh, Dorian stands. There'll be plenty of time to craft his tale and order his thoughts on the homeward road.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying something a bit new, so feedback is adored.


End file.
